Nutrition – function or impact?

Weidema B P (2018)

Publication info

Paper presented at the 11th International Conference on Life Cycle Assessment of Food 2018 (LCA Food). 17-19 October 2018, Bangkok, Thailand

Abstract

This work provides a conceptual framework to distinguish between two different roles of nutrition in Life Cycle Assessment of foods, namely on the one hand in the functional unit that forms the basis of comparisons of foods, and on the other hand in the calculations of health impacts from ingestion of food products. Satiety is proposed as a central attribute for comparisons of food products, while weighted measures nutrient content are suggested to be largely misplaced as part of the functional unit. In contrast, nutritional measures have a large role to play in assessing the human health impacts of the marginal ingestion of specific food products for the more than half of the global population that lives on an unbalanced diet.

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